EVENTS

Lazy Sunday: Got Monsters

First of all, a quick note: sorry there was no recap yesterday. I just figured since the week had so few posts (again… -sigh-) that it wasn’t really worth sacrificing a greatly needed night away from the blaggy-blegs. I’ll recap this past week’s posts when I do the recap this coming Saturday. Moving along to this week’s video…

I feel adding much in the way of commentary would spoil this, but for the sake of context, this is from Mina Caputo, singer of the metal band Life Of Agony, who back in the summer publicly revealed she was transitioning. This song and video’s release predates her coming out.

Slightly NSFW, albeit not egregiously so.

In the words of an e-friend of mine “That’s not subtext. That’s text.”

And links…

The Transgender Housing Network, where you can make a post describing yourself as a safe temporary place for trans people on a budget to stay while traveling (or during emergencies). Finding safe housing or shelter is one of the most serious difficulties and important daily-life / basic need issues that trans people face, particularly since our lives can often be quite suddenly destabilized. So if you’re trans-friendly, and have a comfy couch or futon or fold-out, and are genuinely NOT creepy or chasery, please go ahead, sign up, and help some trans folk out! Me and my roommate have discussed this and decided to do it ourselves.

Black Dahlia Parton steps up, offering to do a better job of the Dan Savage thing than Dan Savage does, and NOT be so consistently harmful towards those queer folk who fall outside their own respective letters of the alphabet soup.

Comments

That’s an amazing and very affecting (is that a word?) video, thank you for posting it as I probably would have missed it otherwise. Also, I love the monsters in paintings link Sorry, I’m not in the right place to read or comment on the horribleness but thank you for the happy stuff!

I guess it probably goes without saying, but the video of Bill opining about the trans* and gay stuff in Glee is seriously loaded with spoken and unspoken bigotry and/or victim blaming.

It’s like he has an instinct for how to convey “your hatred of a minority group is justified” without actually saying anything that he couldn’t easily retract or re-frame later if someone seriously called him out on it. Slippery asshole.

Since Sunday is for randomly off topic posting I wanted to bring up a supposedly popular young adult book involving trans issues called Almost Perfect by Brian Katcher. It had been recommended to me by a great number of people…

SPOILERS AHEAD

I would really like to know what trans people saw in this. It is told from the point of view of a homophobic character who falls in love with a trans girl in his school without knowing it. He proceeds to call her vile names. Reject her. Make up with her and promise her love. Then start the cycle all over again till she becomes self destructive, gets beaten and decides to not transition after living as a woman for 5 years.

Its depressing, demoralizing, HUGELY triggering. Everyone is awful to the trans character. Everyone. I would have been even more messed up then I was already reading this when I was young and pondering my future.

Just wanted to put out some warning and ask if anyone can explain what was supposed to be good about this book that may have read it. I should have got nervous when the book jacket mentioned her big secret was being a boy since shes a trans WOMAN! Not a boy a woman. I am still in a very bad place emotionally having read this…

I don’t get it either. I haven’t read it, but I’ve been heard/read that it’s good from quite a few places…I read the synopsis and decided it would mess me up to read that so decided not to. Having seen your post here, I’m glad I chose that way. It feels bad sometimes refusing to read something…I feel like I should be able to cope and still be sure of myself, but I just don’t need that sort of thing at the moment. I’m sorry you went through that.

My Dark Heresy psyker is growing stranger by the moment. On the mission we’re on now we were passangers on an airship. He sat all day in a corner with a set of hand-sized silhouettes he had cut. He told them little stories and occasionally decapitated one. In the night he went around and put empty envelopes under the doors of everyone – including his party members. No he didn’t warn them in advance. Why are you asking?

There were brigands trying to take over the airship. In the ensuing fight he accidentally spoiled all food on the ship and emitted a scream that shattered all glass within 1 km. So, pretty standard for a psyker.

At the place we are now, a monastery of sorts, we have separate cells. He has taken his remaining silhouettes (and some new ones – he carries a lot of paper) and glued them to the wall. And drawn arrows between them, seemingly at random.

I think my next move will be drawing red crayon on some of them so it looks like they are crying blood.

Oh, and he collects the noses from his enemies and has in a bag. He smokes them so they won’t rot.

It’s not that it would be a problem to be with people (if I knew them), that’s fine (and so obviously online is also fine, though more complex to make work well), it’s more that the people don’t exist. I’ve been into RPGs of various sorts since I was at least 10, possibly younger (I was into table top games even earlier, I was playing Battletech when I was 7), but other than one childhood friend I saw not so often (and haven’t seen more than twice in the last 17 years), no one has ever shown interest in playing, despite my (repeatedly failed) attempts to build interest with people I knew (the number of which can be counted on one hand). Considering the number of people available today is roughly 1/5 of the number back then, things haven’t really improved…

I took me a while to bring them to mind (they weren’t new games by any means in 1996), but the games I actually played were mainly Shadowrun, and Elric, Call of Cthulhu, and Pendragon (I don’t know how I managed to be involved in so many Chaosium games…)… I was very familiar with Rifts (and related games) and (old) World of Darkness (I didn’t even know there was a new version until a couple of months ago :p), although I don’t think we ever got around to actually playing either…

There are many DMs who will coach you through the first months or so. You’ll learn as you play along. And if your purse is light (and whose isn’t these days?) you can always join a freeform group. Just be aware that ‘roleplaying’ can have a somewhat… different meaning on the Internet.

Well shit. I wish I’d known about the housing network thing when I had my own place. I moved into a two bedroom apartment with my then girlfriend and she disappeared two weeks after we moved in. I was stuck with a big empty room with a bed for a year while I waited for the lease to expire.

That video was amazing. It was so intense and beautiful. As Lucy said, I otherwise wouldn’t have come across it, since I don’t know the band or the singer.
I saw the monsters in the landscapes elsewhere this week, but I had to look at them again. They crack me up. I wish I could paint well enough (read: at all) to do that.

Wow, that video was amazing. I particularly like that slow shot of the tattoos fading into the arms near the end. I also like that the self-image of the woman in the video was so subdued … it defies the usual expectation that trans women always want to be exaggerated glamour goddesses.

I think that’s partly why it felt so powerful to me. That’s a self image I can relate to. The “exaggerated glamour goddess” image of trans women that was most prevalent in the media really made it hard to see anything of myself in that…

I never really liked her Heavy Metal stuff – but I don’t like Heavy Metal. But she had a beautiful ode to NYC, on her solo album released under her old name Keith Caputo. Her solo album was a more poppy, harmony laden acoustic confection. Give it a listen here.